I am a fiction junkie. There. I've said it. I am rather flexible in my literary taste, but for quick entertainment, I usually turn to either Terry Pratchett's Discworld books or Patrick O'Brian's Master and Commander series. I buy them in paperback, either in the calm privacy of my own home from Amazon or in a rushed frenzy at an airport.
In the latter case, I am known to sometimes invest in duplicates. Yes, I have mistakenly bought books I already own, either from the Discworld or the Master and Commander series, and I have difficulty deciding which is more embarrassing: opening the book aboard a plane and getting a strong sense of deja-lu or coming home from a trip and sheepishly trying to sneak another dupe to the bookshelf without my wife noticing.
For some time now, I have kept a catalogue of my books using Books, an open source personal library management application, reminiscent of the non-free Delicious Library, but with less emphasis on visual appeal. Books has a simple enough user interface, and allows scanning in ISBN barcodes using the built-in Mac webcam and retrieving book data automatically from online sources.
Best yet, Books has a number of data exporters to different formats, and one of the export plugins is the J2ME exporter. This plugin creates an J2ME application which contains a searchable index of your library titles, and the application can be installed to an S60 phone without problems. While the application lacks visual pizzazz, it will definitely answer the "do I already have this" question at Stansted with 3 minutes until Gate Closed.
Comments
Cool. I would love to see
Cool. I would love to see something similar for DVDs. I have over a few hundred DVDs. I can never remember if I have the movie when I am at the store.
Naturally, the commercial
Naturally, the commercial solution Delicious Library comes to mind.
I tried actually autofilling a DVD in Books based on the barcode, but no results were found. The existing plugins look for an ISBN, which is not found on my DVDs. I suppose such a plugin could be developed for Books, however.